There has been an insane amount of hype surrounding AI over the past few months. Supposedly, Teslas are going to entirely drive themselves in a year or two, AI will be smarter than humans next year, and an army of a billion AI-powered robots will replace human workers by 2040, and that is just the AI promises made by Elon Musk so far this year. The entire AI industry is awash with predictions and promises like this, and it feels like AI development is on an unstoppable exponential trajectory we humans simply can’t stop. However, that is far from the truth. You see, AI is starting to hit a development ceiling of diminishing returns, rendering these extravagant promises utterly hollow. Let me explain.

To understand this problem, we need to understand the basic principles of how AI works. Modern AIs use deep learning algorithms and artificial neural networks to find trends in data. They can then extrapolate from this data or generate new data along the same trend line. This starts by “training” the AI, where a massive amount of data is fed into it for analysis, enabling it to find these trends. After this, the AI can be queried for an output. This basic concept powers computer vision, self-driving cars, chatbots and generative AI. This is a somewhat reductive explanation, but it…